Sometimes quiet can be a good thing. Here’s a short story about a town in West Virginia that gave up their wireless gadgets.

GREEN BANK, West Virginia—The barrage of noise and distractions that are all but inescapable in most American communities is refreshingly absent in this unassuming hamlet, located in the wooded hills of Pocahontas County, four hours west of Washington, D.C. Here, no cell phones chirp or jingle, and local kids aren’t glued to the glowing screens of their mobile devices. Older residents roll down their car windows to greet each other and leave their front doors unlocked.

But Green Bank, population 143, isn’t a technological backwater. On the contrary, it is the proud home of one of the marvels of the space age: the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, or GBT for short. Towering nearly 500 feet above its wide, green valley, with a dish large enough to cradle a football field, the GBT is the world’s biggest fully steerable radio telescope—and one of the largest movable objects anywhere on land. Locals jokingly refer to it as the Great Big Thing.

The GBT and other radio telescopes enable astronomers to detect and study objects in space that give off little visible light but emit naturally occurring radio waves—objects such as pulsars, gas clouds, and distant galaxies.

The three Sisters volcanoes tower over the cities of Sisters and Bend, Oregon. This photo was taken from the lava fields that were deposited between 1300 and 3000 years ago from the volcano named Belknap. Only two mountains can be seen from this area. The volcano with the most glaciers, is the Middle Sister. The other, is the North Sister. The South Sister which is considered to be an “active” volcano cannot be seen from these lava fields.

I have a friend who is a retired professional writer and she posts “rants” on Facebook. With her permission, I am posting her most recent rant.

I love the way some people make up definitions of words to suit their own purposes.

Yesterday in the Reading Eagle a woman carrying on about the current focus of Tea hatred, the children coming across the border, said the word refugee means someone fleeing from a state of war. So these kids aren’t “refugees.”

I got out the ol’ Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which defined “refugee” as someone fleeing from a country because of danger or persecution. No mention of war as a prerequisite.

The woman went on to lecture that kids in our own country need help. After all, the economy is bad and so on and so forth.

When I read that, I started thinking about kids in our own country, too. Just probably not the same kids she was thinking about.

I was thinking about kids I saw standing in the middle of a godforsaken snow-covered desert on a Navajo reservation many years ago. Torn clothes, little food, missionaries and government workers living in beautiful houses, grand pianos in their living rooms. Those kids need help too. They always have. Ever since we invaded their country and took everything they had, they’ve needed help. Ever since we took their uranium to power our addiction to electronics, they needed help. Ever since we won their land from them, fair and square, first by poisoning them with smallpox and booze and then by taking any arable land they had left by murdering those who tried to stop us, they needed help.

But those weren’t the kids this woman was talking about. And it occurred to me that’s why these haters are so afraid–because all hate stems from fear.

Oh, these good Christian folks might fear the wrath of God. But I’ll tell you what.

You know how you get those little postcards in the mail sometimes telling you that you’re part of some class action lawsuit because you bought a malfunctioning Pez dispenser between 1995 and 2003 or something? You’re told if you want to be part of the lawsuit, you need not do anything. If you want to opt out of participating in the lawsuit, you must say so in writing.

So I am writing to tell you I’m opting out of the lawsuit you’re filing against President Obama.

This has nothing to do with the fact that on CNN tonight they showed you and some of your fellow Repubs mocking Obama while readying your lawsuit. I’ve grown accustomed to you folks acting like a bunch of spoiled brats each time you don’t get your own way about something. No, this is all about money. My money.

I can’t get a definite figure on how much you’re going to spend of taxpayer money for this. Whatever it is, it’s too much. You haven’t earned a cent of your pay for quite a few years now. So you’re going to sue the President for trying to earn his.
Pardon my denseness, but I’m somehow missing the logic in that.

You and your fellow Repubs spent $2.3 million worth of taxpayer money trying to defend the indefensible Defense of Marriage act. You did this even though poll after poll indicates that most Americans really don’t feel the need to stick their noses into someone else’s personal life. You and your fellow Repubs are spending an estimated $3.3 million on your most recent Benghazi investigation. Courtesy of the taxpayers of course. Once again, excuse me for my denseness, but I’m still not getting why you were silent when several thousand Americans were killed in the 9/11/2001 attacks–despite the fact that the Bush administration had received warnings that indicated such an attack was coming. And I’m also a bit befuddled about your silence when Bush took us into Iraq looking for non-existent WMDs. How many people died because of that little jaunt into fantasyland? If silence is golden, you and your fellow Repubs have a whole Ft. Knox worth of silence on that one.

So. I’m opting out of this lawsuit. When you get a ballpark figure on how much this latest exercise in ignorance will cost, please divide that amount by the number of taxpayers in the country and send me the refund I have coming. Also, I would like this in cash. No offense, but I don’t want to be left holding a worthless check when you’ve finally managed to bleed my country dry with all your “fiscal conservatism”.

I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next on your agenda. If I recall, Michele Obama was wearing a blue dress in that beautiful photo making the rounds a while back. Maybe you could sue her for discriminating against Repubs by not wearing a RED dress. Just a suggestion. I’m sure that, even as I write, the Republican Nitwit Committee is brainstorming more ways to spend lots of money on all these vendettas you’ve tried to pass off as being in the interest of the American people.

So. Please remove my name as a plaintiff in your lawsuit. I am looking forward to receiving my cash refund, which I will immediately take to the supermarket to have it examined with their nifty money scanner to be sure it isn’t as bogus as you are.